#well more like mash button run a circle away from the enemy and repeat

[antirepurp]

digimon world 4 is like if a game was good but also bad and piss-easy but also ball-crushing difficult

[spacezeta]

Devlog - About combat, or: let’s threaten the player

So here’s the devlog about combat that I was going to write the other week but then the camera one turned out way too long!

And if you thought the camera one was long, boy do I have a surprise for you...

So here’s a fairly long (and a little bit rant-y) write-up of my thought process about to combat or not to combat, and how to raise the stakes in a horror game in order to give more substance to the ‘horror’ part.

*Emphasis on thought process because as the game is still in development, I’m still figuring out the proper mechanics of it all

---

When we first started making this game, one of the first things that we ended up establishing was that there would be no combat. And looking back I’m not sure why - it just kind of... was. I guess it was to make things easier, but on hindsight we really should have thought that more thoroughly.

So that was the first version of the game that we developed (we had a sort of demo alpha thing done as a student project), but right away there were some glaring issues that needed to be addressed (hence the whole ‘reestructuring of the game’ that I’ve mentioned a few times before). One of the biggest issues weren’t exactly about combat, but rather how to create a tense atmosphere for the player. So follow me down the rabbit hole until I get to the bit about combat!

So. We’re making a horror game, right? And when you’re making a horror game you don’t want the player to feel all safe and happy and calm, you want them to feel tense, to be on edge, and, most importantly, you want to scare the living shit out of them. So how do we go about achieving that?

(No, not jumpscares, you cut that shit out right now)

What I think you should to (emphasis on I and think, as in, personal opinion, and you should, as in, me making this game) is basically make the player feel threatened. You make the player feel scared to enter a room because they don’t know what might be lurking inside. Have a constant threat of something looming over the player’s head everywhere they go. And while that might be an easy concept to grasp, the big issue lies in what exactly that threat is.

(No, not jumpscares! I said stop that!)

So here’s the thing about jumpscares:

They’re not a bad thing... when used in conjunction with other things. Used by itself, it’s just a very cheap way to get a reaction from the player. Sure, a monster popping out of nowhere to scream in your face is going to startle you - but that’s just it. It’s startling the player, not scaring them. If your brother hid in the dark to pop out and scream at you when you come in the room, you’re gonna be startled. And then you’re gonna be angry because that’s just not what normal person should be doing, Peter.

But anyway. A jumpscare is also only really effective the first few handful of times, because after that it loses its power and the player will probably just be going ‘Oh, boo to you too, Mr. Monster’. You need to save up on the jumpscares to only use them when a perfect opportunity arises (like when the tension is at its highest, or when the player is least expecting it and quickly build tension). There are a lot of situations where a jumpscare can come in handy, but it should never be used by itself. If you’re gonna Boo! at the player, Boo! at the player and then do something else along with it.

(Also I have a jumpscare pet peeve when jumpscares make absolutely no sense in-universe. Like, I can understand a monster screaming - monsters are, you could say, prone to shrieking and loud noises, so it makes sense. But when a horror game or movie have a thing pop out with a loud sound, a thing that by all means and laws of physics should make no sound whatsoever, it just grinds my gears so friggin much. Worse yet when the characters react to it! Boo, camera cut! Boo, title card says TUESDAY! Boo, there’s some paint on the wall! Boy what a loud wall!)

But I digress.

So, about the threatening the player bit...

How do we threaten the player to make them feel unsafe? That was the trickiest part to figure out during initial development.

One option is going for the being chased by enemies route. Think something like Outlast or Amnesia, where there’s no combat and you have to run away and hide from monsters to survive. Aaand we kind of just ruled that out. Partly because the map isn’t all that big which might have just ended up with the enemy and player running around in circles, and partly because if you don’t do it properly you might end up with something less threatening, and more troublesome. Like, say, you’re in the middle of completing a puzzle and suddenly an enemy pops out and you have to drop everything to run all the way back to shake them off to finally be able to go back and do what you were trying to do in the first place - that kind of troublesome.

A second option is having combat. Or enemies that appear and that you can deal with in one way or the other. Aaand we also ruled that out and I just don’t know what the friggity frack we were thinking. I was very dumb, essentially. I think I was influenced by this current trend in horror games to have no combat whatsoever, in order to maybe leave the player feeling helpless in the face of danger. And honestly, I should have just taken a long hard look at the horror classics that are influencing this game and realized: the!! friggin!! combat!! it’s there!!! dammit!!

So, no chasing and no combat. What the hell do we do?

Basically I did this thing of trying to make an idea work that clearly does not work but I tried and tried anyway instead of letting it go and it’s basically a really bad thing that I do, and now that I’m finally aware of doing it I’m trying really hard to stop.

Note to self: if an idea isn’t working, let it go! Try something else!

Long story short what we tried to do was this thing where being around an enemy drained your health/sanity/whatever and you needed to escape the room to be safe by pressing a series of quick time events to open the door and leave. It didn’t work.

So there’s combat now! The end!

Well, okay, not really.

So, combat at last.

When I say combat, I don’t mean the action-game-one-man-army kind of combat. I mean the combat that’s of the I-have-a-rusty-pipe-and-will-smack-the-shit-out-of-any-ugly-thing-that-comes-my-way-oh-god-what-the-hell-is-that-maybe-I-should-just-run kind. Think of the first Silent Hill games, the first Resident Evils and even Fatal Frame, where the combat essentially boils down to being a ghost paparazzo.

So, now that we’ve decided on combat, the looming threat that I mentioned before becomes fairly well defined: it’s the possibility of an enemy encounter. You can even play with that expectation, like having one or two fake out scares (just do not overdo - I’m looking at you, scenes of a random cat jumpscaring you out of nowhere), or by pulling the rug out from underneath the player by having an enemy pop out in a seemingly safe area and give them trust issues.

But for the player to dread meeting an enemy means the combat can’t be easy - but it also can’t be frustrating otherwise it just fails as a game mechanic. The player can’t breeze through enemy encounters, each one needs to feel like an actual threat that the player has to deal with (either by killing them or tactically retreating a.k.a. running away please don’t hurt me).

Kind of a side rant: Honestly, if someone asked me what the downfall of the Resident Evil games as a horror series was, I’d probably say it started with the combat. Not all of it, but I’d say a good deal of the blame was there. *Please note I haven’t played either RE7 (as someone who tends to get motion sickness, first person games are things that I avoid) or the RE2 remake (this one I will get as soon as it goes on sale because games are expensive and I got no money).

I mean, I still love RE4 with all my heart and those Regenerators will live on inside my nightmares, but I thought earlier games felt much more tense because the combat in 4 was a lot more action-y than horror-y, though it hadn’t entirely tilted over to the action side... Then 5 came and ruined it all and then 6 came and was like ‘what’s a horror game’ (and I say this as someone who had fun with 6!) and the rest is history.

But it did get me thinking about one thing: the combat mechanics. I found myself frustrated when trying to go back to older Resident Evil games and struggled to deal with the bare bones combat and the clunky tank controls (granted, the latter more than the former), so I started wondering how much of the tension in older games had to do with actual horror, and how much of it was due to the insecurity you get when dealing with awkward controls in a moment of crisis.

Playing around with combat mechanics

So, having figured out that I wanted combat, the question became ‘how to combat’. Or something along those lines. I didn’t want to make things too easy, but I also didn’t want to make the player frustrated.

Here’s the part where I repeat what I said right at the top of this post: as the game is still in development, I’m still figuring out the proper mechanics of it all.  So basically I’m just gonna register here what my experiments have been so far, and, like I said in the camera devlog, there are no tank-like controls because those are just a pain to deal with.

So at first I made it so you could only attack after aiming... But then that felt clunky as hell considering this is melee. So I scrapped that idea and made it so you could walk and attack at the same time.

I did keep the aiming part though, but made it optional: you can still walk and attack, but attacking while aiming will deal higher damage.

And in the spirit of keeping the player from just mashing the attack button I’m trying out a little something: Chaining attacks to deal higher damage but also making it so that, should the player press the attack button again too fast, the animation will restart, basically cancelling the previous attack. This would be a nightmare in a fast paced action game but since it’s not, I’m hoping it’ll force the player to be a bit more careful when confronting an enemy without it becoming a frustrating mechanic so, again, it needs more playtesting!

Also enemies can also chain attack you for higher damage!

And that’s basically it! I’m sorry if after all this buildup it ended up being disappointing oops

But considering Observo is going to be a somewhat short game I don’t have the time to develop a complex battle system that’s just not gonna be used a lot in a game with puzzles as the main focus. So that’s it! Thank you so much to anyone who’s still reading this at this point, haha

[dorkyungsoowrites]

Fatal Ties Ch. 7

Pairings: Baekhyun x You

Genre: Angst/Smut/Fluff | Mafia AU

Warnings: Mild Violence

Word Count: 2k

Description: The temptation to give away secrets has never been so sweet.

| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | The Ending |

The bandage was falling off his head again. You saw the fresh stitches underneath. Skin forcibly pulled back together with special thread to heal faster. Slightly inflamed from irritation. He could apply things to it to fade the scar after, but there would always be a remnant. Because of you. You and your stupid fucking temper the first day you met. Baekhyun was under your protection now. Nothing could happen to him. He was your asset. Your responsibility. These motherfuckers who decided to shoot at you were attacking him as well whether intentional or not. You'd make sure their scars would be far more permanent.

Jacket in hand, you shoved Baekhyun down. Forcing his torso to bend, and he whimpered as his face stopped millimeters from the seat by your knee. You steadied yourself with a hand between his shoulder blades as Chanyeol swerved a bit. You'd need a clear shot at their tires to stop them for good. It was a much easier target than their heads. Calling out over your shoulder.

"Steady out the car. I need to aim."

"You're crazy!" he argued. "They'll shoot you as soon as you put your head out the window!"

"Then do a 180."

"That's the opposite direction we need to go!"

"They won't expect it. I'll shoot at their tires while we pass them. Do it, Park!"

"Fuck!" Chanyeol pressed his lips together in a firm line, readjusting his grip on the steering wheel with one hand while the other hovered over the gear shift. Closing his fingers into a fist once then taking hold of it. Glancing in the rear view to see the positioning of the car following. You took a steadying breath and rolled your window down that had already been shot once. Bracing on the door. Two more gunshots burst in the air. You couldn't think of the possibility that you'd be killed the moment they had you in sights. This was the best chance you had at hitting a tire and escaping. Your brain barely registered the music Chanyeol had been playing before still running on the stereo. Tuning out all else to focus on surviving. You only had seven rounds in the gun to get it right. You had to get it right.

Then his voice boomed,

"Now!" The car jerked hard to the left. Rubber screeching on asphalt. Your momentum all but dead as it channeled into the front of the vehicle. Pivoting almost directly on the spot. As the rear end swung into the correct direction you heard Chanyeol jerk on the gear shift. Engine humming louder as he stepped on the gas quickly. You followed the position of the other car. The assailants slowing suddenly as they came up on your front. It worked. They were shocked. Them stopping as you gained speed. You pointed your pistol out the window, second hand steadying your first. Forearm rested on the windowsill for the greatest stability. Looking down your sights to the wheels of the other car. Pulling the trigger. Each concussive bang far too familiar to your ears. One, two, three, four, five, six.

It struck. The air pressure exploded out as the lead tore through. It was your turn to be surprised. The chassis falling limp on the rear side. Scraping and shrieking on the road. Scraps of tread trailing after them. Red lights and a bit of smoke signaling their frantic and unexpected stop. Chanyeol shifted into the next gear. Accelerating away. They sat there. Crooked on the side of the road. No one got out. Typically your little pistol wouldn't have enough power to do anything beyond puncture so the tire goes flat after a few minutes. It gives you time to create distance. Maybe they would have been fine if they hadn't stolen a lemon with tires decades old, but they didn't. It was compromised from point one. So you profited.

Heaving a loud sigh, you mashed a finger on the button to roll the window up again. The wind soon closed off to the confines of your car. You shut your eyes and took a moment to breathe. It didn't last past the inhale. Hearing loud panting behind you. Turning to see Baekhyun scramble to pull his pants leg up. The fabric bunched and got tight at the knee. Revealing split skin on his calf. A nice clean line of a grazed bullet. Crimson clotting slowly. Your eyes darted to his door. A dent. Lead smushed inside. You followed the line back to your side door to where you could see the entry point. Sunlight coming in the small hole.

Shit.

You quickly took out the clip on your gun and counted two remaining bullets. Shit. The clip clicked back in to place. You mis-counted one of their gunshots as your own. A stupid mistake. You also hadn't forced Baekhyun's legs up on the seat like you had your own knowing this was a possibility. Another even more idiotic mistake. By all rights you shouldn't have even gotten ambushed.

"I know what you're thinking," you sighed. Baekhyun's breathing remained shallow. Eyes wide in fear.

"I don't know. Were you thinking, 'holy shit holy shit, I just almost got shot'?" At least he seems alright, you think. No. You were thinking about suspects. Motive. Timing. It was all too convenient with the plan of the alliance. Someone who knew your schedule had whispered poison to the wind of deceit and clutching for power. Someone with friends willing to go about the foolhardy mission of taking your place. Someone who knew killing you would keep chaos and senseless precedents on the street. Thinking the wedding was distraction enough to catch you vulnerable. There was a mark on your head, and a spy among your inner circle.

First was to identify the problem. That was done easily enough. Human greed never surprised you anymore. The ambush lighting their intentions brighter than a flare. Second, think up solutions, and lastly, proceed with the most viable one. Working toward a concrete goal is the best coping mechanism in your mind; it solves the problem. Leaving no room for grief or worry. The second step was holding you back. Procedure broken.

"This is all dissolving into one miserable fucking headache," you lamented. Agitated and unnerved. Your lack of knowledge dented the neat little compartments you had your anxieties stored in. Wrapped in a steely will. Without a clear explanation you could formulate no plan. You could not rationalize the steps. You were left confused and wandering listlessly for answers. You were left anticipating another strike at your heart with no counter measure.

Now was not the time to demonstrate how frightful you could be to keep the lower ranks at heel. Too many bodies had been piling up lately. Crushing small prey under your boots in hopes of rooting out dissension wasn't an option. Now was the time for tact. But comprehension breeds control, and as Chanyeol drives a long path to double back to your manor you steadily realize you are lacking in fuel for this trait at the moment. You dare never show it. You coveted composure. It empowers you. Pragmatism your blade in an industry where emotions get you killed, or worse. You don't have a plan.

But they don't know that. Your gaze flitting between the back of Chanyeol's head and the window that was shot first. He was the most likely mole. He knew where you were and where you would be at almost any hour of the day. Setting up the ambush would have been as simple as sending a text when he picked you up at the tailor shop. The thought roiled uncomfortably in your belly. Sweet, dorky Chanyeol. So bright and naive to your world outside this car. It would have been all too easy for someone to slither ideas into his head. Or perhaps he had always despised you under his polite mask. Would you have to kill him outright? No. There was someone bigger pulling the strings. You needed intel. You needed to manipulate and keep keen eyes for clues.

"Are you...alright?" you hear quietly from the seat over. You've been silent too long it appears. Brooding, even. Baekhyun has already pushed his torn pants back over the minor injury and settled his frantic demeanor. Adrenaline spike sloping downward now that danger was no longer immediate. Returning to his regular gossamer state.

You can't give anything away. Chanyeol would be watching for weakness too. And if not Chanyeol, it could be anyone. You must endure alone. Your chest anguishing with betrayal yet blotting out any outward variation in expression.

You chase knowledge with the intent of preserving the empire around you despite others' thoughts that your methods are cruel. Making the wrong choice will mean more lives lost. It's only natural for you to fear failure. The more you succeed, however, the more it seems people pour their lives into your hands. Dependent on your guardianship. The weight turns heavier. The dread around uncertainty grows.

The more you endure, the more you're affirmed trust is intrinsically illogical. Everyone is an enemy. Every action not calculated leads to chaos. You slipped, distracted by Baekhyun, and danger came all too swiftly. Strength is both safe and exhausting. You envy Baekhyun's freedom to be soft as he is. Agonizing internally, aching to give in but still unable to. Nonetheless, you have to tell Baekhyun something.

"I'm fine. We should tighten security until the wedding is over."

"Do you have any idea who that was? Do you think they work for my dad?"

"Hush," you ordered. "It doesn't concern you."

"It doesn't concern me?" Baekhyun repeated bitterly. Voice raising. "I was nearly shot! I think that entitles me to some kind of explanation!"

"Nearly," you replied monotonously. Refusing to look at him. Instead staring out the front window past the empty passenger seat. "Clear difference from actually being shot."

"I can't believe you're so...like this!"

"Then I guess you're just as light-headed as I suspected." You only need him to shut up. Out of your peripheral you see him face you directly. One hand sinking nails into the front seat to steady himself and channel his aggravation. Knuckles white. His glare does nothing more than itch. No weight behind it. He would never lash out physically. So it did nothing to deter you.

"It's another secret isn't it?" Baekhyun guessed. Tone more pained than anything else. It was unexpected. You glanced. He hadn't been glaring after all. His brows were pinched in worry, eyes swimming with sympathy. "Please, this is my life too. You can trust me. You can depend on me." He would break, you think. All too soon. Shaking your head in disapproval, you turned away.

"I wish that were true." His nails retreated from the leather. The backs of his fingers ghosting from your upper arm to your shoulder, and then your jaw. You shut your eyes briefly and tensed against the shuddering breath your body attempted to betray you with. Baekhyun's fingers glided over the shell of your ear as if brushing away hair.

"If I take over wedding plans," he said in a muted voice. "Will that help you?"

"Yes."

"Then you can rely on me." He continued to pet your cheek and trace under your chin. Then taking it in his grip and turning your face to him. Repeating it like a promise. "You can rely on me." Your eyes flitted back to him. The temptation was there in his sincerity. For a split second, you considered it. Your lips parted and your eyes pleaded for his help. Baekhyun waited, holding his breath. Then,

"No.” The most honeyed voice is often the most dangerous. You hardened your heart and tore his hand from you. Sitting straighter. You couldn't give up any control. "And the events that just happened don't leave this vehicle. Chanyeol, dump the car once you drop us off."

"Yes boss." You needed to set an established course of action in your mind before you returned to the manor. You needed information for yourself, and you couldn't agitate whoever was after you. It would only provoke them to strike harder. Your vulnerabilities needed more than a shadow. There could be no cracks in the facade.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Floating World

by Wardog

Tuesday, 06 September 2011

Like everyone else, Wardog has been playing Bastion.~

Kid sits down, tries to write a review, but the words ain't coming.

Let's try this.

A silent, nameless, white-haired protagonist wakes up one morning in a bed in a shattered room floating de-anchored in a swirl of coloured space. “Proper stories supposed to start at the beginning,” growls a narrator reminiscent of the cowboy in The Big Lebowski, “here a kid whose whole world got all twisted, leaving him stranded on a rock in the sky.” A tap on the gamepad and the kid is out of bed. “He gets up,” continues the Narrator, “sets off to The Bastion, where everyone agreed to go in case of trouble.” There's nowhere to go except a door-shaped hole in the hole so that's where the analogue stick takes him. Coloured paving stones fly into a path. “Ground forms up to point the way,” comments the Narrator. “He don't stop to wonder why.”

So begins Bastion, an isometric action-RPG, available for PC or Xbox for just under a tenner. It seems to be the game everyone is talking about at the moment (even a

surprisingly uncritical Yahtzee

) and I can see why. There's lots to love about Bastion, from its gorgeous presentation to the elegance of its mechanics, and, make no mistake, I do love it. Best “just under a tenner” I've spent for a while.

In terms of gameplay, it's a fairly standard action-RPG. You run along, gathering up XP, and laying the smackdown on a variety of rapidly spawning enemies but the various places you visit, are sufficiently streamlined and differentiated that the experience never grows stale. Everything is beautifully detailed and carefully contextualised: you start to recognise the various creatures, and learn something of their background. The places, ruined as they are, all have their own history and the visual device of the forming and breaking pathways creates a atmosphere of change, variety and transience. And there are so many exciting ways of tweaking your character, spending your XP and customising your weapons that you're always finding new ways of approaching the game's challenges. XP is a straightforward bar; every level allows you consume a new “spirit” created in your distillery. These have a range of interesting effects, as well as characterful descriptions and amusing names – my personal favourite being “Stabsinthe.” Over the course of the game the Kid acquires a small arsenal of weapons, ranging from his “old friend” (a big hammer) to a chaos cannon, all of which play slightly differently, and have a wide array of strengths, and weaknesses, and can be upgraded by collecting memory fragments, found by exploring the world and defeating monsters. You get a choice of two alternative paths per weapon, and a total of five upgrades, each requiring the appropriate material and enough fragments, but the game is wonderfully liberating in letting you change your upgrades around once you've paid the cost. This encourages experimentation and makes you genuinely fond of your equipment – since you're never just swapping one generic longsword of the badger for another generic broadsword of the piranha. The Bastion serves as the main gameplay hub. From here, you'll explore the game map while bringing back the cores and fragments that allow you to build, and then upgrade, the various structures of The Bastion. The pattern is slightly repetitive, and the plot is basically a series of not very subtle MacGuffin hunts, but the pleasure of restoring The Bastion, and deciding whether you want to build a shrine or upgrade your forge, keeps the experience engaging. The emphasis seems to be very much on choice. You can choose to worship one of the Gods, for example, when you've built a shrine, which will make battles harder (in a variety of ways) but give you greater rewards. The point is, this offers you an extensive degree of customisation for your game experience, right down to how challenging, and in what ways, you want to make it. The thing is, the gameplay is sleek and non-offensive, but at its heart its a straight-down-the-line action-RPG. You go places, you collect things, you kill stuff, you get more powerful, you make your equipment more powerful, you rinse and repeat. But there's been such an amount of love and attention poured into the game that playing is a constant delight. I absolutely loved the colourful, shifting world, the charming descriptions of pretty much everything you encounter, and the soundtrack is a little piece of a perfection all on its own, contributing such a lot to the mood of the game. There's even a song:

This song absolutely typifies Bastion: you have the juxtaposition of the country guitar and the Eastern strings, melding two unlikely traditions, deceptively simple lyrics underscoring a theme of racial division, and that poignant combination of beauty and melancholy, bitterness and hope.

The story of Bastion, which I will shall try to explain without too much spoilering, concerns the mysterious “Calamity” which has led to the shattered world in which the Kid first awakes. As you progress through the game, your goals are simple enough: find survivors, restore The Bastion, stay alive. But the Narrator mixes commentary with memory so that the further into the future you get, the more you understand about the past. I've mentioned the Narrator already – you meet him soon enough, a old man called Rucks – and he is the primary mechanism through which the story is delivered and filtered. And it works astonishingly well, bridging the gap between ludo and narrative (ouch, can't believe I wrote that) in a coherent and cohesive way. Rucks tells you about the places you visit and the people you encounter, making the world, and its ruination, feel real, but he also validates and contextualises your in-game actions. For example, the first time I missed my step and plummeted off the edge of a path, he observed “And then he falls to his death. I'm just fooling” which made me chuckle and on subsequent occasions, he would throw out some circumstance-specific statement, such as “Kid had to watch his step in The Cauldron” or whatever.

He also makes your game-play choices feel like genuine in-world choices, as the narration seems to dynamically react to how you play. For example, early on you come to a crossroads while searching for one of the cores. I set off randomly in any old direction because there didn't seem any reason to act otherwise: “Kid figured heading down would take him to the core...” explained Rucks. I loved having my gamerish disregard transformed into strategy by the alchemy of narrative. Rucks will also comment on your weapon choices and combinations, and on your general approach to the game, among other things, which, once again, embeds gameplay in storytelling, providing a diegetic framework for the decisions you make. There's also an extent to which it functions almost as a meta-commentary on the tropes of gameplay. As I mentioned earlier, the first weapon you find in the game is your trusty hammer. And, like any action-rpg player, the first thing I did on discovering a weapon was run around in circles, mashing the attack button, until I'd pretty much smashed up every piece of scenery on the screen. “Kid just raged for a while,” said Ruck, darkly.

It is possible, of course, to overstate the value of this device. It is assuredly one of the most successful marriages of gameplay and story I've ever encountered, but not every game can be narrated by a whiskey-voiced cowboy. It's something that works beautifully in Bastion – and makes the game truly something remarkable – but it's not, y'know, the great gameplay/story revolution or whatever.

The other thing that took me by surprise was the decision that hit me at the end of the game. Actually, there were two but the first was a relatively simple one. The second, however, was so vast and morally complex that I actually had to put the gamepad down, walk away and think about it for a bit. That probably sounds either mad or pretentious, or mad and pretentious, but firstly I wasn't prepared to have to make a decision in a “simple” action-RPG and secondly the decision was literally world-changing. And I realised suddenly how much I had come to care for the four companions I'd met in this broken world. They are not voiced, they don't join your party, there are no complicated dialogue trees, or lengthy textual descriptions but somehow they'd become my friends. I was, when I finally made it, happy with my final decision. I don't think, on consideration, I would have done otherwise given the choice again (although, of course, I could always play the game again to see). But it has nevertheless haunted me for days.

I'm going to talk about this decision, and some of the game's stylistic choices, after a massive honking spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler warning. But if this is as far as you're going to read: I will simply urge you to the play the game. It's delightful. I would probably also recommend you play on Xbox, or with a gamepad, if you have the option since the diagonals are a killer.

So...

yeah...

spoilers...

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The Calamity comes about because the Caelondians (your people) basically try to genocide the Ura (some other people). Essentially the Caelondians come up with a device that will seal the Ura forever underground, except an Ura sabotages it and this causes the Calamity.

On a very basic level, the Caelondians live in the sky, the Ura live underground but there seem to be massively complex ideological differences underpinning all this as well. The Caelondians seem all into tech, and the Ura are more naturalistic, the Caelondians comercialise their religion, the Ura are offended by graven images (at one point you pick up an adorable Pyth plushie – Pyth being the bull-God of order and commotion, and Zulf, one of your companions, disdains it), and so on and so forth. The thing is, I think the Caelondins are very broadly meant to be associated with the the west and the Ura with the east. They way the Ura dress (long robes) and look (pale and dark haired) suggests this to me, as well as the slightly higher-pitched sound effects and the weaponry they use (like the naginata and the repeating crossbow). I don't mean to get my minority warrior freak on, but I think when you stylistically set up an east-west dichotomy like that you're opening a can of worms that you might not entirely want to be opened. Or rather that you might not be able to deal with appropriately within the limitations of a computer game.

The thing is, there's plenty of evidence that the Caelondians were not so great actually. As a Caelondian, Rucks' narration generally communicates nostalgia and affection, and a yearning to go back to the way things were, but there's plenty of darkness in there too. There's a general suggestion of moral and social decay, and the lives of the Kid, Zia and Zulf have been far from happy in the city. But both as a westerner, and as the gamer behind the Kid from Caelondia, the Ura are portrayed as being, in many ways, profoundly other. Of course, you transcend this perception of otherness through your friendship with Zia and Zulf but there comes a point when you go up against hordes of interchangeable Ura, waving naginata at you, and I genuinely felt like I'd been sent forth to kill the nasty foreigners. I don't know if it was meant to be making me deliberately uncomfortable but I would have been more at ease with the moral message if there'd been less of a real world race correspondence. As a game about racial division it's interesting and at least reasonable subtle (since the cultural hostility is deep and endemic and nobody at any point says how much they hate those white-faced Ura), but as a game about how we should be nicer to Japanese people it's a bit embarrassing. I just think it's inherently problematic to use stylistic markers associated with the Western perception of the East to denote “the exotic other.”

The Ura, incidentally, are trying to stop you from restoring The Bastion and, once Zulf discovers the truth about the Calamity, he betrays you to rejoin his people. It's hard to really blame Ura for being a bit pissed off about the proposed genocide, but, again, I felt the moral pendulum started swinging a bit awkwardly at the point at which, once their plan fails and you overcome them, they turn on Zulf and attack him too. Those foreigners, eh? No loyalty or honour. Again, I understand that the situation is meant to be morally ambiguous, with good and bad on both sides, and the tragedy being ultimately a very human tragedy of individuals making mistakes rather than a specific villain ruining the world – but, once again, that ambiguity would be more meaningful if hadn't ended on a gigantic cop-out. Having Zulf's own people turn on him when things go wrong essentially undermines his motivation for trying to save them in the first place. Also, this leads to the noble-hearted Caelondian saving the Ura from his own treacherous people.

The reason Rucks is so eager to restore The Bastion is because it contains a fail-safe device that essentially re-sets time, putting everything back to how it was before the calamity. But, you also discover, The Bastion has one other function: it can jettison the city core, transforming it into a sort of fully functional floating city that could take you anywhere. The choice you face, therefore, is putting the world back to the way it was, saving thousands upon thousands of morally degenerate genocidal racists (or “lives” if you prefer) or live in the world as is, with your new found friends in your floating city. Okay, I've been slightly harsh on the morally degenerate genocidal racist score: there is no real evil in Bastion, just mistakes, humanity and bad choices. The point is, it's a city full of people, and there's no evidence the Calamity is an inevitable consequence of, well, anything . Also, on the eve of the calamity, Zulf had just proposed to the woman he loved (a Caelondian) so going back to the past would not be a future without hope or happiness for some, perhaps for many.

I have to admit, race concerns aside, I found this decision genuinely fascinating. It came slightly out of left field because the fluid, emergent form of the game in general hadn't led me to expect a sudden either/or, but it was embedded so well in the context of everything preceding it, that I was stymied. I've been reading around in the Internet since I made my decision and one popular (but stupid) opinion seems to be that it's about personal selflessness, putting the needs of others above your own, saving thousands of lives at the cost of maybe three. How Peter Molyneux. Thankfully, I believe the decision is much more interesting than that and, in the end, I jettisoned the core. I will not lie: love did play a part in my decision. I wanted the Kid to be with Zia, and Ruck and Zulf. But one of the major themes of the game seemed to me to be the importance of memory: Ruck's narration, the act of constructing memorials for the lost, the literal collecting of memory shards to upgrade your character, and, of course, the constantly shifting, reforming and re-shaping of the world itself. From the old ruins, come new paths. This is how the past shapes the future. And if we do not remember the mistakes we have made, then we are doomed to repeat them.

Of course that's just my take. It's deliciously arguable either way. And it's possible that I'm just over-compensating for the unbearable guilt of having sacrificed thousands of imaginary people to fly around a world with my friends: the cowboy, the singer and the survivor.

Either way, it was deeply refreshing to play an RPG in which I neither defeated a villain nor saved the world.Themes:

Computer Games

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CRPGs

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Minority Warrior

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valse de la lune

at 06:39 on 2011-09-07I'll post more thought on this later; like you I found the ending quite moving and I have Many Thoughts about Bastion. But--what did you think of Zia getting a voice (literally!) to speak with only at the very end, when hitherto you only heard her in the song and the narrative is entirely shaped by Ruck?

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Wardog

at 09:11 on 2011-09-07I, too, found the ending very moving - and I've been thinking about the game a lot since I've finished it, which is comparatively rare for me.

I wasn't actually mad keen on Zia getting a voice, it was a bit sudden and incongruous and I felt it impacted too much on the final decision. I mean it seemed to setting it up to be Rucks versus Zia, and whether you want to save lives or shack up with a girl you fancy. I mean I think there are many interesting philosophical reasons to jettison the core; because it Zia's life was sad before is not necessarily one of them.

Looking forward to your thoughts :)

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valse de la lune

at 14:01 on 2011-09-07It's kind of irritating that she finally gets to say something for herself and it's mostly to confirm her role as a kinda-sorta designated romantic interest.

Anyway, about the Ura, I'm... very touchy about fantasy analogues for racial minorities, for obvious reasons--and doubly so when the analogue in question is so fucking pasty I thought they were vampires. It's intellectually dishonest and doesn't read to me as anything like a serious attempt to tackle the issue of colonialism. The final bits where they show up to do their noble savages thing made me

really angry

(what the hell is this even supposed to be? A mix of Roma and what, Zulu warriors? They didn't read as Chinese to me; the style of dress is way off; see Zia's head scarf. If, however, they were meant to be an East Asian analogue, well, I'm going to mail Supergiant rotten fish). It's out of place for such a cute game and I wish the author(s) hadn't taken this angle at all. Please writers, unless you have the intelligence and perspective and insight of say Octavia Butler, stop it right the hell now with the race thing.

Stop it forever.

Fucking Minority Warriors.

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Wardog

at 15:41 on 2011-09-07For what it's worth, I don't think they were specifically trying to write an East versus West thang. I mean, it's clearly just a fantasy story with a racial division theme, not somebody trying to be insightful about the west being a bunch of big meanies.

I did, however, read the style of the Ura as being faintly Japanese but that could just mean the racist here is me - the way they dress suggested kimono, they seem to fight with nagainatas, and everything you learn about their culture suggests that it's quite Mysterious TM and Ritualistic.

I mean, for God's sake Kyra, it's just a game, and it's cuuuute, so I could have totally over-reacted but I just worry that every time a text wants to mark exoticism or difference they, consciously or otherwise, reflect perceptions of real world difference.

I mean they could have made the Caelondians bears and the Ura moles, y'know. Or whatever. I just sort of felt they were heading towards Cowboys Versus the Japanese without really being aware of it.

Loved the game though, loved it.

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valse de la lune

at 16:22 on 2011-09-07No, I'm not exactly commenting on the Ura bouncing off what you've said--my remarks are based on my own reactions (i.e. I don't think you're overthinking this etc), and the combination of "marginalized people" and "noble savages" hugely puts me off. Without that I could have liked the game without reservations. :/

I must say that the PC port was pretty well done, with higher-res art assets for PC resolutions and everything.

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Wardog

at 16:50 on 2011-09-07Like I say, it's really not my place to point at depictions of other races and made loud minority warrior comments; I just felt a bit uncomfortable and, as you've pointed out, the whole noble savage thing on its own is the ick.

I played on Xbox from the comfort of sofa - the graphics were lovely enough it probably didn't do it justice, admiring them from the other side of the room.

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valse de la lune

at 17:09 on 2011-09-10One more thing: I can't be the only one who's put the ending theme on repeat and listened to it like a gazillion times, right?

:'(

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Wardog

at 22:51 on 2011-09-10Guilty.

I was listening to it while writing the review.

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Bryn

at 17:18 on 2013-03-19

Look, new thing!

Female protagonist is a nice change, especially in light of some

points

raised about Bastion's use of gender. I hope they do as good a job writing for this character as they did for the guys in Bastion.

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Wardog

at 14:39 on 2013-03-23I am super excited for this. I loved Bastion.

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http://lalunatique.livejournal.com/

at 02:04 on 2013-10-22Confession time: I found out about Bastion through this article and played it just so I could get past the spoiler alerts. (Of course the game itself sounded appealing, otherwise I wouldn't have minded being spoiled.) The story is short and sweet, and gameplay was hugely enjoyable. The final choice left me boggled and thoughtful, too.

I also chose to dump the core, for several reasons. Like you said, without memory people will just make the same mistakes. Rucks himself admitted there was no guarantee the Calamity wouldn't happen all over again. And if it wasn't the same chain of events it would be something else, given the hatred that existed. The way I saw it, the least-worst choice in this utterly crapsack situation was to preserve the memories and mistakes of the four fatally flawed failures on board the Bastion so they can travel around telling people to avoid the pratfalls they and their civilizations made.

In the end I just didn't buy Rucks' idea for the eternal reset button, and I hated how it served as justification for the Kid's slaughtering countless creatures and people. With this ending they're all going to have to live with what they did--Rucks for being complicit in the Calamity in the first place and for cheerleading the Kid through the killing fields, Zulf for seeking mindless revenge in the shattered remains of his world, Zia for her selfishness in not giving a shit about the countless people who died, and the Kid for the destruction he caused to no account. I hope it hurts them all. I hope it hurts good, because pain is the only natural and moral reaction to all they've seen and done.

Perhaps paradoxically, I also wish all of them good lives, lots of adventure, companionship, and love. I hope their mistakes have made them wiser, and I hope they'll spread that wisdom to others so not only they but the world can grow and learn.

As an Asian woman I give my Official Minority Stamp of Approval to the awful handling of race and gender in Bastion, wonderful as the game and story are. The Ura did in fact strike me as Asian-influenced--their culture seemed interesting and I would have liked to learn more, but this external view didn't do much other than exoticize them in the tired old tropes. Also I really could have done without having to mow through hordes and hordes of them. At the end of all that, rescuing Zulf for me was more about tiredness than anything else; I wanted my Kid to be tired of all the death and destruction when there had been too much of both already, and no longer caring if he died without the almighty Ram (not the first Ura invention in the game to be appropriated by Caelondians.).

Also, Zia. Ugh, Zia. The character, together with Zulf, managed to combine Racefail and Genderfail into a giant ball of suck. Because obviously the males of the Other Culture (plus females who are not really characters but interchangeable, disposable sprites) are threats to fight against, but the females are harmless and docile love interests. OBVIOUSLY. At the very least she wasn't kidnapped, but it also seems (though it was vague) that she managed to get herself locked up anyway, because everyone knows Those People will turn on their own at the drop of a hat. I felt like throwing my keyboard across the room from the offensiveness of it all, all the more because the overall story is compelling and engaging--my frustration was all the greater because I'd gotten hooked, whereas if the story had alienated or bored me I would just have rolled my eyes.

So thanks for introducing me to this great, thought-provoking game. I might have spent too many hours of my life fiddling with the keyboard and mouse controls and given myself repetitive stress injury, but with the increased blood pressure from some aspects of the story, my body was probably tricked into thinking it was getting a much-overdue workout.

[slapegg]

Quick Critique: Dragon Quest 8

Re-release or not, Dragon Quest maintains its position as a C-tier RPG. Dragon Quest just... exists. It's not awful but it's not great or exciting by any means. It's harmless. It's a game you play while doing something else, like watching TV, surfing the Internet, or listening to a podcast. I spent most of the early parts rewatching It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia and that seemed to work out pretty well. I never played the original version of the game, so if anything I mention is a new feature or spoilerish, sorry?

DQ 8 has terrible pacing. The first task is to talk to everybody in a town followed by constant running back and forth between people or places. The whole game suffers from a lack of motivation. You're just kind of wandering around trying to find a vaguely defined bad guy, who then gets away, and you have to meander around until your paths cross again. The time in-between is usually spent doing filler quests that typically involve helping royalty. And royalty in the game is constantly corrupt or incompetent but it treats saving them with the utmost importance. Almost all the interesting stuff in DQ8 happens before the game and is rushed over in flashbacks rather than being something you experience.

The game couples its lack of purpose with a terrible sense of direction where it doesn't guide you to what to do next or where to go. Without direction or even an indication of why you're on this journey, you wander around until you stumble upon the next thing that drives the plot forward. There are multiple points where your guidance is simply "go west" or "it might be somewhere in the east". There are a lot of things "west" so some more information would have been helpful. Sometimes you have to talk to people in a specific order or else you can't advance, so it leads to a lot of time wasted running in circles repeatedly talking to townspeople I didn't want to talk to in the first place. When it does give you directions, even those are usually horrible. One person told me my objective was on a hill upstream, but in reality, I had to go down to a beach and follow it downstream to get to the hill. Or your objective might only be available at a certain time of day, so if you don't set out at the right time, dusk will come causing your magical bird shadow to disappear with the damned objective in sight and you trudge back to town, rest up, and do the whole follow task a second time.

Story issues aside, it just doesn't play well. The camera is in too tight and can't handle close quarters (like most of the caves and dungeons!) or slopes so it zooms in even more and your character's head takes up most of the screen. The walking speed is slow, and your ship is even worse so you quickly learn to just take the mainline path and not bother exploring (thank you, over a decade of people posting maps and FAQs!). You get a mount 20 hours into the game, but it can travel faster than the game can handle the pop-in, so enemies will spawn inside you. The text is super blurry. Like, my eyes start to hurt if I play this for long periods of time kinds of blurry. It shows its age in how grindy it is with the costs of items and experience it takes to level up versus what enemies actually pay out. It has a crafting system so I was always afraid of selling my previous equipment in case I'd need it for a recipe later in the game, which meant I could never sell it back to make some money back and speed up the process. Bosses spam status effects, making beating them luck-based and there are bosses that can cast instant death spells on your entire party. When I died, it didn't feel like it was my fault because my party was usually confused, asleep, cursed, and/or paralyzed at their time of death, but then when I beat bosses, it didn't feel satisfying because I won due to the RNG just working for me that time. There are DLC downloads that grant you... crap once a day? The first day gave out an item that was good against Metal Slimes, but by the time I actually met Metal Slimes, I had an ability that was more effective anyway. I never got anything decent out of the downloads again so I'm not entirely sure what its purpose is.

One of the side quests is a series of monster battles, but you can't control the characters so you have to rely on the AI. And the AI is braindead. It will sit there with near full magic and let its entire team die without using a healing spell. Every time you make an attempt at the series of three battles, you have to sit through overly long and repeated dialogue scenes that you can't skip through, because even if you skip the dialogue, you still have to wait for camera pans or character animations to play out before you can advance. It doesn't take any skill, you just need to be there to mash on the Fight button over and over until the battle progresses and a random number generator decides to work in your favor.

The best thing I can say about DQ8 is that it has a really fun skill tree. It doesn't actually tell you what the abilities do and you don't know which weapon to spec towards because of that, but after looking up an FAQ and making my decisions based on that, I really looked forward to the skill points I got from leveling up more than the actual stats I got. I beat the final boss and post-game extra boss by throwing an old man at them as the final blow with an ability I learned from the skill tree. So, thanks, skill trees! Also, the game has a sexy pirate lady that joins your team and that is a wonderful combination of three words. There's a quick save that's pretty handy for a handheld game. Given everything else the game does poorly, that seems worth calling out as a plus. You can see the monsters on the map, but that's not as helpful as it sounds because dungeons are cramped and monsters are faster than you so there's frequently not much you can do when you see one in your path. If you pause the game and go to a settings menu that replaces the regular game screen, the game will unload all the monsters on the map and then reload them when you close the menu. You can use this to scum your way around some monsters blocking your path. The monsters also only appear when you're on land, so during the tedious and slow sailing segments, you still run into random battles.

It took me about 50 hours to complete the main game and major sidequests, but they weren't 50 enjoyable hours. It really felt like it could have been 10, at most 20, hours long for how little non-grinding, non-backtracking, non-aimless wandering content there actually was. I would have much rather played the 10 hour version of Dragon Quest 8.

The game also has a really scummy treatment of the lead female characters. Jessica is little more than eye candy. My introduction to her was in Dragon Quest Heroes where she has a big personality so it was jarring to now play this game and she's barely more than just T&A. She rarely says or does anything of her own will after she joins your party. And the Akira Toriyama art style does nooot do T&A well. Her forehead is ginormous and she has the worst outfits, so she doesn't come across as sexy, she comes across as the game being sleazy. The princess is treated like a prize or an item rather than a character, with your final acts in the game having you decide which woman to marry but none of them really seem to have a reason to want to marry the main character. It's like one of those "Mario/Link saves the princess and all he gets is a kiss. She owes him!" discussions but somebody actually had the terrible sense to put it canonically in the game. The initial driving force of the story is that the princess is turned into a horse by evil bad guy magic. The princess may have been transformed but she still has her mind and you don't actually have to treat her like a horse! There's a character in the game that tries to ride her and the game treats that as a "he's such a jerk!" moment, but the difference is that he doesn't know she's more than just a horse. You KNOW she's a cursed human being and you treat her like a horse anyway. You're way worse than that guy. And later in the game, you find a magic spring that can turn her human for a brief period of time, but the story and game won't let her drink from the spring without your permission. There's actually a prompt to "Let her" drink and return to being human. Why is that this nameless, personality-less jerk's decision to make? The silent, bland as beige hero wound up being the character I hated the most. Sure there's an evil dog that goes around murdering old women, but I was kind of hoping for the horse princess to kick the hero in the head so I could play as somebody else.